Too Much Saturation Can Be Bad

I’ve been judging lots of photography lately, and I’m noticing a lot of overly-saturated photos. Too much saturation can be a bad thing. I like photos that pop more than anyone I know. But I want that pop to be realistic.

I also don’t like the side-effects of an overly-saturated print.

When you work with the HUE/SATURATION dialog in Photoshop, be careful that you don’t dial in colors that are outside the bounds of your printer’s ability to reproduce them. In order to see if the colors you are setting are outside the color gamut, use the Color Gamut warning (Control-Shift-Y on a PC or Command-Shift-Y on a Mac).

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Scott,
How do you determine over saturated? I can understand the printing limit, but I have been struggling with what is the appropriate amount. For you as a judge is it purely subjective or is there some sort of criteria that you use?

@Bruce sort of – I’ll explain when I have more time. @Nick – I’m not going to parse words to that degree. The point of this post is to talk about the out of gamut warnings. @Kevin the answer is simple…if it triggers the out of gamut warning then it’s always unnatural.

I hope you guys do a show on working in different color spaces soon. ProPhoto,etc. plus monitors are so different across the board ,people dont see what others will see in the final photo they put up on line.

@Jack: “I hope you guys do a show on working in different color spaces soon. ”

Amen to that! The subject came up in forums the other day and I did my own research on the philosophy of converting RAW to ProPhoto or other extended-gamut colorspaces for editing.

There’s a lot going on there, what with so-called invisible or “phantom” colors, tonal ranges being wasted on gamuts that can’t be displayed by monitors or printed by printers, etc., etc. That one subject alone could fill an entire hour!

There’s lots of good data, and emotion, on either side of that debate!

I confess to nudging the the saturation a bit from time to time so I went back and checked some of my recent work with the Gamut Warning. I was disappointed to find that according to Photoshop some of the colors were apparently overblown. But being the disbelieving type I went back and checked some of the “unretouched” original images and found many of the same warnings. How can it be color be un-natural if all the color came from the nature of the scene, so to speak?

Totally agree with this, I have seen it a lot on flickr too. Probably just because it gets more wows and comments, but overall it ends up looking pretty garish IMO to pump the saturation too much. Just had a good email string about this with a beginning photographer friend of mine..

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